Politics

Here are two technical terms, before we get underway: fiscal multiplier and blinkered. A fiscal multiplier simply describes the relationship between government spending and GDP. Blinkered, which was a theory developed by Professor Obvious from the school of common sense, may apply George Osborne.

Ken Rogoff and Carman Reinhart – the two academics who wrote that rather controversial paper suggesting that when public debt to GDP rises over 90 per cent, growth falls sharply – have come out fighting. And you know what, their observations not only make a lot of sense, they are...Read More

Last June BBC 2’s ‘Newsnight’ had a kind of Paul Krugman special. The Nobel Laureate and arch supporter of Keynesianism was on the show for almost its entire duration. And a big hullaballoo it created too.

But one particular piece of controversy, relating to the Baltics and how their...Read More

Each month, UK government borrowing is either up, or down. It is difficult to draw any conclusions, because so many things have an impact on the data. But public borrowing figures released in April are different. They tell us the scale of government borrowing over the course of the previous...Read More

You may recall that the Queen once used the Christmas message to say of the year she had just experienced that it was an annus horribilis. The chancellor has just had one of those horribilis periods, it is just that in his case it was a week. And I’m not...Read More